With the curved handrail made up, I can think about moving on to painting Ivor. There is still work to do to the body (filling some gaps etc.) before it can be painted but I want to get the chassis painted and fully assembled, including pickups and coupling rods, first. Whilst I can easily paint the chassis black I also need to paint the wheels. These are always depicted as having red spokes and central boss, with a green balance weight (when it's drawn) and rim. The problem is what colour green should I use?
The instructions suggest that the model should be painted using "Plastikote 104S Enamel Paint Garden Green" but to my eye looking at this photo (lifted from the instruction sheet) that is way too bright a green.
Given I'd like to use a paint I can use both with a brush and in the airbrush I had a look at the Vallejo Model Air colour chart I have (possibly a bit out of date now) to try and find a good match. The problem is that the colour of Ivor also seems to change from drawing to drawing in my childhood book and in the end I couldn't find a single colour that matched perfectly, although I did find four colours that seemed close to what I needed. A little bit of shopping later and I had four dropper bottles of paint. Of course paint in a bottle can be very misleading so I made up a quick test piece.
I tried to replicate the final colour as close as possible (I settled on using a brush rather than the airbrush for speed) by giving the brass a black undercoat, then adding a patch of each colour, before sealing with a matt varnish. The numbers are part of the code of each paint so that I know which is which. My inital thought was that the one on the left (Model Air 71.006 Light Green Chromate) might be the best match. I know it's tricky giving varying lighting conditions and problems of the camera trying to correct etc. but does anyone want to have a guess before we go any futher?
Armed with the test piece the next step was to try it against some of the plates in my book. First stop, the front cover
Now I've always thought that the front cover image is a bit dark, but my first thought of the paint on the left does look like a reasonable match, at least amongst the four paints on the test piece; the two on the right have way too much blue in them.
Next I had a look at the classic drawing of Ivor singing with the choir for the first time.
As you can see the colours are much brighter than on the front cover, and now I think the second colour (Model Air 71.095 Pale Green) is a much better match, although not perfect.
I had a further flick through my book though and settled on this plate from the story where we first meet Idris
Now to my eye that second colour is an almost perfect match to that plate, or at least as good as I'm likely to get without trying to mix my own custom colour. What does everyone else think?
95 appears to do the job. Not for this obviously but our Auto paint suppliers can match anything if we take a sample. They have some sort of analyser that they point at the paint sample and then mix up however much one needs. It's been spot on for the couple of jobs I've used it for. They fill aerosols or do it in a can for spraying. I bet if you paid them they'd mix to any sample you wanted and it would most likely cost little more than the model paint folk charge. They also do two pot paints but they really stink, they make one cough and splutter a bit as well.
ReplyDeleteBe aware that Vallejo, although brushing and spraying extremely well, is not the toughest paint on the block, and is easily damaged through handling. Something to bear in mind as you have little ones.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Hadn't heard that before but in retrospect from handling unvarnished painted parts in the past that makes sense. Hopefully sensible varnishing (gloss before the transfers, and then matt) should help.
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